Look at what the molotov cocktail guy accomplished by "taking direct action against a clear and present danger": Nothing, besides casting himself as an extremist nut, increasing the resistance to his viewpoint in the population at large.
It's downright dumb to attempt to impose your will via unilateral violence when you aren't in a position to actually complete the goal. Note that that goes whether you're actually right or not.
I think the majority of the population at large either doesn't care about what happened or wish that the guy had actually managed to kill Altman. Not even necessarily because Altman is involved with AI, but just because he is extremely rich. I don't imagine any increased resistance from the population at large - the population at large either doesn't mind when rich people are killed or loves it. The exceptions would be people like entertainers who develop a parasocial relationship with the public and provide direct joy to people, but AI company leaders don't fall into that category.
That said, it is true that killing Altman would almost certainly achieve nothing. See my other post in this thread.
That said, the same is true of nonviolence.
We walked out of the Cold War alive. Humanity has faced extinction before, and despite it all, we walked away alive last time. It's not unreasonable to think we can do it again.
I'll answer with a quote from the founder of the Rationalist movement, Eliezer:
"How certain do you have to be that your child has terminal cancer, before you start killing puppies? 10% sure? 50% sure? 99.9%? The answer is that it doesn't matter how certain you are, killing puppies doesn't cure cancer."
I can know "this doesn't work" without knowing exactly what does work. "Violence is the only tool we have, so we have to use it" is the sort of logic that leads to the Holocaust.
If you want my own personal observations: Over the past few centuries, we've managed women's suffrage, black suffrage, gay marriage, etc. largely without violence, so clearly there are processes out there for progress. We fixed the Ozone Hole without killing people. I don't think murder was involved at all in finding recent AIDS medication, or GLP-1.
There are tons of examples of successful social progress in the past few decades that don't involve violence. Conversely, I struggle to name any terrorists that accomplished their goals by bombing scientists.
If nothing else, we can make violence a lot more legible by embodying it in a legal process, and bringing society onto the same page about it's necessity.
If you wanted to be a contrarian concerned about x-risks go try to find $1B to pay Embraer or another minor aviation vendor to make a plane to do stratospheric aerosol injection or something.
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If you want my diagnosis it is, in a time of lower social inequality cults frequently tried to steal labor and money from a broad base of people.
For instance in the L. Ron Hubbard age Scientology would treat you as a "public" if you had money to take and if you didn't or after you'd been bled dry you would be be recruited as "staff". Hubbard thought it was immoral to take donations without giving something in return so it was centered around getting people to spend on "auditing". Between 1950 Dianetics and the current Miscavige age, income and wealth has gotten concentrated and he changed that single element of the Hubbard doctrine and now it is all about recruiting money from "whales" who donated to the International Association of Scientologists (IAS)
https://tonyortega.substack.com/p/scientologys-ias-trophy-wi...
(A good backgrounder on pernicious cults is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snapping:_America%27s_Epidemic...)
In the case of the Yudkowsky thing the mass just doesn't have a lot of money to steal after paying the rent and turning the labor of the unskilled and ignorant (even if they think otherwise) is a case of the juice not being worth the squeeze, so the point is to build a Potempkin village that looks like a social movement that creates a frame where you can get money from sources such as "SBF steals it and gives it to the movement" as well as "rich kids who inherited a lot of money but don't have a lot of sense"
If you really believed what Yudkowsky says you would be taking action that maximizes the chances of reducing a clear and present danger.
Between Yudkowsky and the Molotov cocktail guy, which approach do you think had and is having more of an impact?
An individual can rarely, if ever, enact change through violence. The history of nearly all successful movements is violence often makes change harder.
Rallying people through speech is a far more successful way for an individual to enact change through violence